My Flying

Get a phone call at 7pm that Friday evening. There is a free slot open in the radio course to be held at the Algoa Flying Club, would I be interested? It's very early in my flying "career", and I really don't need a radio license yet, or have the funds, but let's do it any way.

Follow up:

Arrive at the clubhouse at 8:30am. Course fee, radio handbook and a 1:1 000 000 map of the PE / East London area costs 435,00ZAR.

The course it for a Restricted Radio License, one of the requirements before qualifying for a GPL. Contrary to what the name of the course may allude to, radio operation actually has very little to do with it.

The course covered:

• Controlled airspace zones, such as CTR, TMA, CTA.
• Uncontrolled airspace zones, such as ADA (AFIS), danger areas and so on.
• The seven classes of airspace, i.e. class A to class G and flight information regions (FIR).
• The basics for visual (VFR) and instrument (IFR) flight rules as well as VMC and IMC meteorological conditions.
• Altimeter setting procedures including, QNH, QFE, 1013.2hPa and transitional levels/altitudes.
• The semi-circular rule.
• Flights plans and how to complete them along with some basic navigation.
• Briefly on the phonetic alphabet, Q-codes, zulu time, call signs.
• Even more briefly on practical communication, radio failure procedures and emergency communications.

I found the course extremely interesting and hardly even noticed that it finished at 5:30pm and that my entire Saturday was over.

The exam can be written (not a multiple choice) anytime at the flying club and a pass mark of 75% is required. I think I'll plan to write in two weeks time; will need to do some studying in the evenings before though.